1. Field of the Technology
The present application relates generally to mobile communication devices which operate in both wireless wide area networks (WWANs) such as cellular telecommunication networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) such as 802.11-based networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
A mobile communication device may be designed to operate on two different types of heterogeneous wireless networks, such as a wireless local area network (WLAN) (e.g. 802.11-based wireless network) and a wireless wide area network (WWAN) (e.g. a cellular telecommunications network). Two different wireless transceiver portions of the mobile device are utilized for communications in the WLAN and WWAN. The mobile device switches operations between the WLAN and the WWAN depending on its location and/or other factors.
Each wireless transceiver portion of the mobile device is associated with a unique identification number (e.g. telephone number, IP address, session initiation protocol (SIP) address, etc.) so that the mobile device may receive voice calls through both WLAN and WWAN. When the mobile device operates in the WLAN, it is reachable by its WLAN identification number in the WLAN but otherwise it may be out-of-service with the WWAN and not be reachable with use of the WWAN identification number. On the other hand, when the mobile device operates in the WWAN, it is reachable by its WWAN identification number in the WWAN but it otherwise may be out-of-service with the WLAN and not be reachable with use of the WLAN identification number.
Accordingly, what are needed are methods and apparatus to improve the reachability techniques for such dual mode or multi-mode mobile communication terminals.